


So It Goes

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Complicated Timey Wimey Things, Gen, Lives Passing, Loss, Platonic Love, Platonic Soulmates, Searching, Separations, Soul Bond, Souls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 22:52:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15895779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: This is the story I’m determined to tell—the story of how I’ve always known you and always will, despite also knowing that I’ve passed beyond the reaches of your soul’s memories. The story I’m telling is our story.It’s the end of our story.





	So It Goes

**Author's Note:**

> _AN: Bingo bango bongo fill for the squares “soulmate AU” & “saying goodbye”_
> 
> _And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes._
> 
> **Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_**

This is the story I’m determined to tell—the story of how I’ve always known you and always will, despite also knowing that I’ve passed beyond the reaches of your soul’s memories. The story I’m telling is our story.

It’s the end of our story.

Despite having known you since the beginning of our beings, you stand out so vividly to me in our most recent life. Our previous lives, our previous selves, they’ve left marks on us that are fleeting and incorporeal. I remember you as you were as I do a snowy day, the blurry memories of white and cold and the taste of freezing. I remember you as you are as I do a single snowflake: the focused observation of just how that one flake is so much different from every other in the dancing moment before it flickers away from my eyes, eternally out of reach but never forgotten.

I remember you as you were a thousand years ago, a thousand lives before. I remember you, distantly, before that yet. And I remember every life since in a soft-focus rush of lives lived and loved. Star-crossed souls bound together for eternity, as every soul is star-crossed; our living selves have no idea that we were born together bound by three. The closest human word for what we are is ‘friend’.

Do you remember me? Sometimes, I think you might. You will, in the pauses between lives, as your soul is released from one living receptacle to another. At the moment between, you’ll remember us.

I’m telling this story to ensure that you remember, because, in the millennia we’ve spent together, we’ve known every kind of love and I’m selfish enough to be grieved that it’s over.

 

When there were three of us, this was more complex. Now that there are two, our third lost to time as I now am also, it’s simpler. I visited you in my body’s unconscious moments, drawn to you by our desperate need to never be alone. When your body failed and died, your soul drifting to yet another, you would then take your turn to unconsciously visit my knowing body, fresh and bright and with brand new eyes to look at me with.

When this story begins, you’re five years gone. I’ve been alone since then. My body is aware of this loneliness, even if it doesn’t consciously understand why it has come about. I’m an old, old man in a failing husk, my physical mind quietening as it prepares for the end. My memories are gone. Fleeting, like the winter day, this life is nothing to me except daylights of pain and moonlights of out-of-reach recollections. You were the woman in the bed beside me, until the day that you weren’t that any longer, but, instead, a woman in a box that I no longer recognised.

I miss you, more fiercely than I miss the people in the photos around me. They have no names; my mind cannot recall them. You have no name; what use is a name for a soul that’s lived a thousand lives?

Tonight, my body dies. I’m waiting. I know. I’m more spirit than body, paused on the edge of fleeing. I hope you find me before the end; I’m terrified that you won’t. If you don’t, if this body dies alone… I’ll never find you again. This is the terror that pins the withered, sunken man in the hospital bed down, his breath short. It rasps. Whistles and groans. Death looms with clawed hands grasping for the call nurse button; they never reach it.

I watch myself die, and I wait for you. You’re five years gone. Or is it ten? My memory isn’t what it used to be, while tied to this man. This mortal body.

I’m going to die alone, with no name to remember.

The body whines. It gurgles. Old bones click and old flesh shifts. I watch those eyes close from a place that isn’t within the body anymore.

A hand takes mine. Your eyes, when I meet them, are the same as they would ever be. I close my eyes in that bed surrounded by photos of nameless memories and a dying man and I open them moments later in a bedroom that is devoid of all but you.

Oh, I say. Hello.

You’re perched on the side of your bed, dark-hued in the wash of moonlight leaking in your open window. Like a bird, I think at the time. A bird about to take off, sharply feathered with straight hair and eyes sharp enough to see a rat in the night. An owl, of course.

We’d always loved the owls, in the lives that are now over.

Are you a dream? you ask me. Or a nightmare? You ask about the dying man, your owl eyes wide with a kind of fear. Taller than I’d expected you to be, in a child’s thin body with dark, straight hair and the kind of face that believes in nightmares.

Without the dying man’s fading mind to dull me, I’m sharp once more. I remember. You’re ten—ten years gone from the body that will now be buried beside your last, and ten years born to this new body in front of me, this child.

Just a dream, I tell you, because it’s too frightening for a child to conceptualise what we truly are. What’s your name?

And you answer: Emily.

Your name is Emily.

Did you know that name means ‘light’?

Restless, owl eyes on me, you stand in your lacey white nightgown and pace about with bare feet. _Pad pad pad_ go those feet on the floorboard as they leap from the pastel rug to the boards below. A shoeless dance, giddy with mischief. _Pad pad pad._ You stomp once, a shred of temper, and the door opens in response.

Bed, says your mother. Now.

No, you reply, your mouth stubborn and proud. Those eyes flick to me in the corner of your room, waiting, perhaps, for your mother to notice. She doesn’t of course. And you say, I saw a man die tonight.

She shakes her head at you and says it again: bed. You’re ignored. You smirk. It’s never bothered you when people look through you—you know who you are, no matter how small or slim or wise the body you’re in. And at that moment, I love you for never changing. I tell you this, but the moment is fading and I’m fading with it.

With the touch of your hand upon mine as I leave this world, I’m not scared. I’ll find you when I return, no matter what body I wear. I’ll always find you, I say to you as I fade.

But, looking back on this moment and knowing what’s to come, I wish that as I’d whispered that to you… I wish I’d spoken louder.

 

* * *

 

Let me take a moment to explain something to you: we are creatures bound by loss. Our creation was determined by humankind’s inability to be alone; our continued existence revolves around their preoccupation with becoming so. They are aware of us on some level. They speak of us with words like souls and spirits and inner strength. They know we are here.

They do not know that we are here because they’re afraid to be lonely.

At the moment between lives, as everyone we’ve ever been fold into the one being, we know that we are never lonely. What that feels like is impossible to describe using human words, because it is a concept they simply do not have a word for. They have lonely to describe the feeling of being utterly isolated from every other being; they do not have a word that is its perfect antonym. There is no word for being in a complete state of awareness of the beings around them. As though they realise this, many strive to speak with us, not realising that we are them, as they try to reach that undefinable feeling. It is an irony as melancholic as the fact that they’ll only know this feeling once dead and beyond definition.

Perhaps they remember what it feels like, as three fold into one. Their fear of death defines us: that perfect feeling of not alone comes only when they are ending. It is a beautiful sadness.

If you wish to find more evidence that humans know of us, you only need look at the number three. It is everywhere, in everything they do. They are pattern-recognition creatures and they find three to be a comforting number—as do we.

I’ve always found three comforting, except we’re not three anymore. You were there for my death while I faded as that broken old man, just as I was there for your death before me. Both in body and soul, the person in the bed beside you and the soul standing there waiting to take your hand. Because of that, I will find you when my body is old enough for my soul to do so. Your soul will sing to me with the memory of my death, and I will find you.

Not like our third.

We come in three. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because we’re really only the purest expression of a human, and humans love the number three. Or perhaps they love three because of us, although more likely they love three because it’s hardly ever a lonely number.

We don’t remember our third now, and we never will. He can never find us again because we weren’t there when he died. After that, we became two.

And now you’re one.

What a terribly lonely number.

 

* * *

 

The first time I visit you after my death and rebirth, I’m four years old. You’re fifteen, and I don’t understand what’s happened to you. My body is too young, my mind too new, to conceptualise what happens next or why you’re crying or why you smell like a hospital. You’re sitting on your bed when I open my eyes in a place that’s completely new to me. I’m scared and confused, too young for this. I guess that’s why you see me standing there—we need each other at that moment, and we’ve always been what the other needs.

Right now, you need a hand to hold. And I need to not be afraid.

Who are you? you ask, despite knowing me. I don’t answer, because I hardly know myself. How did you get into my room?

I don’t answer that either, because I definitely don’t know that at all.

And despite being terrified of my being in your room, four years old and in pyjamas patterned with dinosaurs and stars, you still crouch down beside me when I begin to cry. Innately, you know me. We know each other.

You shouldn’t be able to see me. I didn’t know that then, but I do now, and maybe that was foretelling what happens next—because none of it would have happened if your living body hadn’t been aware of my existence in her life. What else I didn’t know then: your name is now Emily Prentiss and you’ve just faced something you’re also far too young for. Despite the abortion and everything you’re feeling that’s complex and frightening, you still hold me close and tell me not to be afraid. It’s a comfort for both me, and I think you as well, that you’ve always been like this; in all of our lives, you’ve always been the first to tell someone not to fear even when you’re terrified yourself. Some things are constant, and your bravery is one of those things.

I finally tell you that my name is Spencer. Spencer Reid.

From then on, we are what we are: exactly what the other needs. And in these new lives, with both of us so small, what we are to each other is a ‘friend’.

 

When I’m thirteen, it gets stranger. We break all the rules.

My body remembers you when he’s awake. I don’t tell anyone about you anymore—not after Mom and Dad and everything that happened with them—but a number of my childhood tales and drawings consist of a girl in my head who I asserted was my very best friend. From what you tell me when I visit you over these years, you remember me also and find a lot more peace in the idea of an imaginary friend than I do.

I tell you that I’m leaving for college in a week and I think that’s when you realise for the first time that I’m not just a detailed figment of your mind. You’re twenty-four and you ask me which college I’m going to. I tell you.

You write me a letter. I’m sitting beside you as you write it, my incorporeal hands on the desk to steady myself despite not being able to feel the wood. I can touch you when I visit, but nothing else. You’re the only thing that’s real during these times. In that letter, you write everything we’ve shared in the last eleven years: you write of how you would sneak out at night and go walking through Rome so I could see the world around you, of how you would wait until I arrived and read favourite passages of your books to me. You write of how many nights we’ve spent together despite being thousands of miles apart.

You sign the letter Emily Prentiss and you address it to Spencer Reid.

Let’s see if you’re as imaginary as you seem to be, you tease as you mail it. I laugh.

I wake up.

And I don’t think of the letter again until I find it on my desk, physical evidence of your existence in this world. And that’s new. We’ve never done this before. If we’ve met in prior lives, it’s been by an act of fate—not a conscious act of our unconscious minds. I cannot describe how wildly my world is rocked; you see, I’ve always secretly thought that I was just as crazy as my mother, telling tales about the girl in my head.

So I write back. This part isn’t new—I’ve always written letters to you, although they’re all unsent and addressed to ‘My Imaginary Girl’. The part that’s new is that I send it.

The part that’s new is that this continues.

 

When I’m sixteen, you close me out for the first time. It terrifies me on a deep, instinctual level, but at the time I don’t know why. I try to visit you and find nothing. Your letters stop for some time.

You come back, this time, but it’s the beginning of something terrible. Of course, you don’t know this at the time, and neither do I, but your discovery that you can push me away—for my own protection, or so you think—will be the end of us. The letters begin again. I visit you in an apartment in DC, commenting on the haphazardness of your décor despite you being twenty-seven and far more fashionable than the furniture suggests.

You tell me your job takes you away from home so often it hardly matters, although you won’t tell me what that job is or why. You look tired. Stressed. I don’t see the bruises you’re carrying.

And I don’t question you further.

 

When I turn eighteen, I put my mother away. It shatters me and I try to stay away from you, not wanting you to see and _know_ how broken-hearted I am. But it doesn’t work. I’m drawn to you anyway and I open my eyes in a huddle on your floor, crying because I’ve shattered my family.

It hurts you so much to see me like this. I remind myself of how horrified you’d been to see me cry so openly—I’ve never told you before how harsh life can be. You know nothing about my upbringing, about the children at school or raising my mother. I’d always hidden that from you, and this night you’re given a savage, realised insight into it. In contrast, you’d always been vocal about your unhappiness, redacting only what you deemed to be unsuitable for ears eleven years younger than yours.

Perhaps this night was an insight into the suffering of the people you love. Perhaps it changed you, just a little.

Whatever it does, the most pertinent of them is this: you recognise my innate loneliness and you come looking for me. You know what college I’m at, although fear of finding me truly imaginary has always kept you away from me, just as your assertions that I’m not to find you have kept me from looking.

You find me. I need to tell you this because you don’t know that you found me. Or rather, you do—you find a boy named Spencer Reid in a shared dorm, studying everything I’d ever told you I was studying. You watch him from afar, trying to conceptualise how _this_ boy, who looks nothing like what I look like when I visit you, is _your_ Spencer. Because of this uneasiness, you don’t approach me.

There’s another beautiful sadness. You didn’t recognise me because my soul is not my body, despite the similar manifestations. You couldn’t see in the boy at that college what you see so clearly when I come to you while I dream.

But, when I turned and saw you walking away, I knew you instantly, body and soul. And I let you go.

I’ll always regret that.

 

After that, you began to shut me out more. I begged and begged you not to. I didn’t know why the concept terrified me so much, except that it felt so irrevocably like loss. When I did manage to slip through to you, sometimes you didn’t see me anymore. Maybe you were pretending or maybe I’d truly become invisible to you. Despite all the lives we’ve lived where this was the norm, in this life, that felt crushing. Like a blow I couldn’t recover from. I missed you.

I miss you.

But life went on, even though I couldn’t tell you about it. After a while, I stopped mailing my letters—they’d begun to come back to me anyway: no person of that name at this address written neatly on the front of each of them. I recognised the hint to go away and, from then on, when I visited you, I didn’t tell you about my life either. I didn’t tell you about receiving my second doctorate or meeting Gideon or beginning at the BAU. I didn’t tell you how much I missed you. I didn’t tell you how sorry I felt for what I’d done to my mother, or how lonely I felt always, or how much I wished we still had what we once did. I barely talked at all.

In my letters, I said all these things. But I knew you’d never read them.

It’s a pity. I think you would have been proud of my life as an agent of the FBI, and what I could have done there, had I lived long enough to do it. You see, I didn’t.

I died.

When you were thirty-four and I twenty-three, you vanished completely. I cannot express how terrified for you I was and it carried into my waking hours. Everything I did, I did with the thought of you dying in the back of my brain. Every moment I was awake, I was picturing you dead, and every moment I was asleep, I was reaching for you to prove it wasn’t so.

I was utterly, completely alone, a concept which we’re all very familiar with now but which I had never felt before on such a molecular level. Not the inner part of me—the part that speaks to you now. This part, who I am now and who I have always been—your soul-bound partner, infinite friend, forever companion? I’ve never been without you, but I was then. Just like our third.

 

I was thinking of our third when I went looking for you.

And I was thinking of him as I died. If it’s any comfort at all, the only thing that hurt about it was that you weren’t there—not in the way that mattered, anyway.

 

My last letter to you was that day.

 

* * *

 

I know what you’re going to ask now. You’re going to ask how I died. I lied before, twice.

I lied when I said you weren’t there, because you were, in a way. Physically, you were staring down at me as Ian Doyle killed me. My last conscious thought was feeling regret that my blood would spoil the blouse you were wearing. How strange our last thoughts are, how inconsequential.

Don’t feel bad—I know you tried to stop him, although I suspect not as hard as you’d have tried if you’d known who the boy kneeling in front of you was. And I know you didn’t recognise me. Maybe that’s why you let me die alone. You’d become so used to pushing me away, you didn’t recognise my soul screaming for yours. Just like he did before he died.

My first thought about waking alone in the dark, severed completely from knowing you, was that I would never find you again. That was my other lie: it hurt so much to die alone. Of course it did. And the pain never stopped, lasting as long as my final, lonely heartbeat. It wasn’t that the pain was infinite; it was simply that the heartbeat was. Your last heartbeat lasts the longest, and perhaps that makes an absurd amount of sense if you think about it. There’s a finite amount of beating before that moment but, in the second of your death, you’re absolutely aware; ahead of you is an infinite amount of nothing. And your heartbeat skips. It takes a breath. A final story, the full stop of your life. Every heartbeat is a story, my mother told me, and in my final heartbeat, there was burning.

And then a bang.

And now this. Nothing. No life, no living, no you.

 

I’d tracked you down to a villa in Tuscany through my contacts at the FBI before taking leave and slipping away without telling anyone. This was a mistake. I would never see them again. I miss them.

My intentions were to assure myself you were alive, to simply observe and then slip away once that was proven. A stupid intention for someone supposedly a genius, but then, my constant is that I’ve always been stupid when it comes to the people I love. And I’m stupid then.

I’m caught and executed in a dirty woodshed with you slamming through the door and screaming at Doyle to stop. Too late. A trigger is a fast thing, just like a life.

I hope this doesn’t haunt you.

There’s a hotel near here with my belongings within. My clothes, passport, documentation—and my final letter to you. I travelled to Tuscany as myself, which may have been the smartest thing I’d done—my belongings will be found in my absence and returned to DC; at least, I hope they will. Potential closure for those I’ve left behind, Gideon and Mom and JJ and Morgan and Hotch. But I don’t know for sure. After all, I’m dead, and the dead know very little about those still living. I don’t know what happened to my body and I don’t know how you felt upon seeing my death. I don’t know if you searched my body and found my name, and I don’t know how you reacted upon seeing it. I don’t know if you know yet that Spencer Reid is gone.

Most of all, I don’t know where you are. Your soul never marked mine as it left this earth, so I’m left waiting in the dark unsure of whether to stay or go. To linger in this dark place and grieve you, or to return to a new body as a lonely, isolated soul and resign myself to my fate. There’s another thing about me that’s a constant: I paralyse easily when facing loneliness. I stay.

As Vonnegut said, so it goes.

 

And on it goes. It’s dark here. I’m left mentally reciting a letter that you will absolutely never be able to read, and I’m forever alone. Thankful at least for language to keep me company, even if the existence of words that describe my situation do very little to improve it. And I’m grieving you like I’ve never grieved you before, no matter how many lives I lived and died beside you.

I’ll stay in this dark until I go mad, because once I choose to move on, you’ll become just like our third to me. A distant memory of a snowy day instead of the clear-edged snowflake you are in my mind right now.

Did you know, I’ve discovered something. There’s a path here that I’ve never seen before, one I’ve never considered. I think perhaps it only shows for those who are alone; no one else would think to take it. It’s a path of fading, of forgetting completely. The universe hates the lonely.

I ponder that path. If I take it, I’ll no longer grieve you. I’ll no longer hurt, trapped in this final, declining heartbeat of dying wearing the face of the man I last was when I knew you.

There I remain, pondering and pondering and pondering until you surprise me one final time. You do the unthinkable.

You find me.

 

* * *

 

We have a lifetime together in the dark. From the moment I look up and see you before me, I know I can’t keep you here despite my isolation. And even if the time we have there is only the space between two heartbeats—the one fading from your death and the one I’m determined you’ll have again—I treasure it because I know it’s finite.

You’re crying. Please stop crying. It’s not your fault I died, and it’s not your fault you didn’t know me to reach out and take my hand at that moment. That’s just how it goes. Life is hard, even for us, and lonely too. I’ve learned this now.

Here is what you’re telling me now, recited to myself so that I never forget it:

You never had the chance to discover the identity of the boy you watched Doyle kill. As soon as you were able, you ended the op—the CIA were the ones who recovered my body as you were whisked away by Interpol. They never told you my name and, as you discovered later, nor did they tell my family who killed me. My body was returned to the States to be grieved by those who knew me without them ever knowing I was murdered by the man who has now, in turn, murdered you.

Or so the story goes.

When you recovered from what Doyle did to you, the scars of which I can still see sunk deep into your very being, you realised something. Something you’d known innately from the very moment of the trigger pull, but which you only allowed yourself to realise fully once home. You were alone, as you had never been before—not for thousands of years. Despite opening yourself to my visitation once again, night after night after night passed without me. And you knew, deep down you knew, but you refused to admit it.

Until you walked my path. You joined the BAU. I’m so proud of you for this—I knew you had it in you to be brilliant and I know you’ll be fantastic at the job. That you’ve been fantastic. You tell me it’s been four years since I died, and that my photo is upon the wall. That’s how you found out. Walking past that wall, you stopped and saw a memory.

Gideon kept my belongings. Kept it all in a storage container that you’re able to purchase in lieu of him no longer paying the bill. And you went through my belongings, and you found every letter I’d never sent. And you read them all. Every last one.

Even the last one.

Please stop apologising for me going looking for you. It was my mistake to make, not yours.

And you say something I’ll never forget because it’s the most real thing I’ve ever heard.

 

“I’ve always loved you,” you say, “but never more than when I read those letters and realised how well I know you. I’ve never regretted anything more than not letting you be with me.”

 

You keep talking, but those are the words I’ll treasure. I was wrong. Perhaps there is a word that encompasses the feeling of not being lonely: love. And we have loved. In every way humanly possible, we have loved. After all, when one exists forever, there’s an awful lot of time to try every type of loving. As mother, sister, brother, father, lover, friend. As we are now: souls, together.

You say, I’m dying now. I’m with you now. I know you now.

And I know what I have to do. You’re determined to stay; I’m determined that you can’t. I’ll risk it because you’ve shown me there’s more to knowing than losing. I’ll risk going back and forgetting you forever, on the chance that we might remember. It’s worth that. It’s worth that and so much more.

But I have a thought: you found me. Emily, you found me.

Maybe _he_ can too.

So I tell you to return, and I promise once more that I’ll find you. There are voices in the darkness and they’re calling your name, trying to summon you back—you don’t need to die here. Doyle hasn’t killed you yet. And if you can live, for at minimum a few more years, I can wait and return and maybe, just maybe, _he_ can return with me. We can be together again. You’ve given me the hope to believe that maybe that can happen.

There’s an assurance in my mind that I’m not telling you: if it doesn’t work, it won’t matter. You’ll never remember me, only that maybe I once existed, like a stain on a carpet denoting years after that a drink was spilled there, even if there’s no memory left of exactly what drink caused the blemish.

So you agree. You leave me there in the dark, believing that I’ll find you again. Our hands touch before you leave, back to those people who aren’t ready to put your photo up next to mine. And I sit down, to wait and hope and maybe, just maybe, remember.

You trust me.

So it goes.

 

* * *

 

Here’s the final part of our story; there’s nothing I’ve loved more than being able to tell it.

You wake one day in a familiar room. You know this room, despite having never been here like this—not in your dreaming moments. There’s a boy awake when he shouldn’t be, trying to hide that he’s been drawing on his wall.

He’s four years old. You’re forty-nine.

He turns and looks at you and he does something that surprises you because he shouldn’t be able to see you when you’re like this, should he? Some part of you thinks that he shouldn’t.

He smiles. Hi, he says. You know him. You’ve always known him, ever since he was born. You were there to cry when Morgan named him after me, despite how confused Morgan had been that you’d cried over a man he doesn’t know you’d ever met.

And you recognise me.

Hi.

I told you I’d be back.

But that’s not the surprise. The surprise is this: the universe really hates the lonely, and it will do anything to make sure that they’re together again. It’s been working to ensure this the entire time.

Turn around. There he is.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you,” says the soul of Derek Morgan, looking right into your eyes before crouching and picking up his son. “It’s been lonely without you both.”

And so it goes.

**Author's Note:**

> I love to hear from you guys. Leave a comment or come chat with us on the [Criminal Minds Discord server](https://discord.gg/kPxKjaE) (don't be shy by how quiet we are--we love new people to talk to!). I also run weekly rewatch threads both on the server and over at the /r/[criminalminds on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/criminalminds/), so come along and join in the small community there. Hope to see some new faces!


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